National Scavenger Hunt Day

Adventure is in your Backyard!

May 24th is National Scavenger Hunt Day. Grab the neighbors, split into teams and challenge each other to a backyard adventure! You can download our printable Rainbow® Backyard Scavenger Hunt list and share it. Maybe your team members collect the items or maybe you decide to use your phone and take photos of each item. Either way enjoy your quest!

A little “scav” history for you. Scavenger hunts evolved from ancient folk games and became part of pop culture in the 1920’s when Elsa Maxwell made them a popular part of parties she hosted. Some American universities have traditions of holding annual scavenger hunts where different dorms compete against each other for prizes. The town of Provo, Utah holds the Guinness World Record for organizing the world’s largest scavenger hunt with 2,079 participants! Most of us are familiar with a couple modern forms of scavenger hunts: Geocaching and Pokémon Go. Whether you use an old school list or participate in a more up-to- date version, there is not doubt we all love a good treasure hunt.

To push the idea further have your kids get creative and make a scavenger hunt of their own. Choose a setting and come up with a list of items to find. Or what about a neighborhood scavenger hunt where kids gather items from different houses on the block. It’s a great way to work in teams and to get out and notice things in the world around you. Here are some ideas for different scavenger hunt settings and items to find.

Settings:
Baseball Field
Campground
School
Park
Playground
College Campus
Downtown
Neighborhood
Church

Items:
Ball
Mailbox
A logo
Stop sign
Dog
Blue car
Fire truck
Restaurant
Campfire

You can stage your own scavenger hunt or have participants look for items that are naturally found in the settings you choose. Another fun idea is to have participants decipher a clue in order to know what they should find. For example: This is big and red and noisy (fire truck).

You can get started by printing our Rainbow Backyard Scavenger Hunt and we hope it inspires to make one of your own. Happy hunting!